Sage Advice from SW trip: Don’t leave Camera in the rental car!

It amazes me how many things I need to learn before I can live my life right, but at my age the forgetting curve is beginning to collide with the learning curve. Anyway, I suppose not leaving your camera in the rental car is not really a new idea for most people.
We’ve been back for a while, but my little Powershot camera spent some quality rest-time at the Hertz Lost and Found Dept and touring on a Fedex truck and is just now back with its load of pics.
Since nothing is breaking news here, I’ll start with the last one first. We always stop at Cochise Lake in Wilcox, Arizona on the way out. We found White-faced Ibis, Bonaparte’s Gulls, Avocets, Long-billed Dowitchers, Cinnamon Teal, Eared Grebe and other great birds at this wetland that is very popular with water birds. Here are two Franklin’s Gulls at Cochise Lake. Franklins are gorgeous with the foraging habits of swallows—aerial insect-hunting, and are among my favorite of the Gulls.
Cochise Lake looking south. For waterbirds, this is the only game in town.
On the way up to the ranch we crossed paths with some Javelina. In town these critters are panhandlers and too unafraid, but in the outback they hightail it away immediately.
We also had five female Pronghorn on the road up the canyon, here’s two. Haven’t seen those in a while, glad to see they are doing ok.
Since I’ve got a Mammal thing going, at the ranch we had the usual gang of handsome Coue’s Whitetailed Deer including this young guy.
Typical of early spring, it was windy but we got some deck time. This is Delia and CD Littlefield, the resident Wildlife Biologist.
The Lucifer Hummingbirds were in, but not many other spring arrivals.
We went over to Portal Arizona and the South Fork Cave Creek Canyon and the wonderful grounds of the Cave Creek Ranch and to visit friends down there. Up South Fork we found good densities of these Painted Redstarts, but I was lucky to get a shot because they move around so fast.
This Acorn Woodpecker posed, showing off the blue gloss color of its back.
Yellow-rumped Warbler. We also had Lucy’s, Black-throated Gray and Townsend’s Warblers.
Check out this pair of Gambel’s Quail.
We had a duststorm in the valley. Early spring is the toughest season in the Southwest with the wind coming up and the leaves not out yet. We’re in the San Simon Valley looking toward the Peloncillos here. But we also had a wonderful rainstorm a couple days later.
We hiked to the pass with some friends who came to visit and looked down Maverick Canyon.
We went down Maverick to a place CD calls “Lee’s woods.” Lee was a bootlegger whose corral and homestead were downstream.
We spent two days fixing barb-wire fence up Beehive Canyon. Here is the view of the house, in the middle far right, from Beehive.
To continue the trip in reverse order, we found this Vermillion Flycatcher in Airport Wash in Tucson upon arrival there at the very beginning of the trip.